Recently Snortneypoptart on FetLife had a post with this title about reconnecting with her third love. This brought to mind my third love, a relationship doomed from the start.

My first love years later became my partner. There was a woman who I should have loved but didn’t. Another woman who became my second love. And almost a year later the third love.

There’s so much about the third love which is problematic, requires explanation, turns back on itself and requires a different explanation. She was a year younger; I was a very young 19-year-old. I didn’t know her well, I’m not sure she wanted to be known.

What I did know was part of a continuing recitation. Her father was at a major university. Her boyfriend was in prison. She believed she had paranormal abilities. She liked Middle English literature. The first two were definitely true. I was excited to meet someone with a similar literary interest but when I pulled out a volume, I don’t know what, Chaucer, Sisam’s Fourteenth Century Verse and Prose, Mossé’s Handbook of Middle English, whatever, she pushed the book away and turned the conversation to something different.

I’m not going to write about when I first spent any time with her. That requires too much explanation. I could present it one way and it would be a fun story but not really true. There are layers to what happened. What I experienced and what, on examination, I think was going on. It was an innocent bit of fun with an edge. She was still an absolute stranger to me.

And here’s an aside. I’m a demisexual who constantly found himself in relationships with people I didn’t really know. Sex first kind of relationships. That wasn’t true with the first love.

So, there’s this woman I sort of knew who was the friend of another woman I sort of knew. A month or so later there was this party and afterwards I got ready for bed. When I went to my bed this naked woman was in it telling me, “I’m spending the night.” My first impulse was to throw her out. My second was sort of, Oh hell, go for it. Back to the first impulse. Back to the second. It was easier to go for it.

I’m not sure when I became aware of the major university, the boyfriend, poltergeists, and Middle English. I am almost sure this was afterwards. After that night we spent a lot of time together. Mostly sex. Sometimes doing other things, but mostly it was fucking all the time.

There are other moments which were definitely after that first night. Her thinking it cute to hang a used tampon on a former boyfriend’s room’s doorknob. Her telling another former boyfriend, he should just give up, it was over. My realizing that this wasn’t going to last forever. I had to enjoy the moment I had and then be graceful in letting go.

She was maybe the first woman to tell me about her rape, about trying to commit suicide after, and because of state law having to be institutionalized. Just about every woman I’ve known has had their story about being raped which says a lot about men.

She told me about how her boyfriend, the one who was in prison, used to make her get condoms, her only form of birth control, from a gas station men’s room. This was fifty years ago and it was a pain in the ass buying condoms. We had condoms, but they cost so much, and we were having sex all the time. I tried to remember to use one at least once a day. So of course there was a pregnancy scare and this was before Roe vs Wade.

I associate sex with movement and with her movement was amped up several orders of ten. That was a persistent connection in my mind long afterwards. Her and movement and sex and what I wanted to find in a partner. I also associated her body type with this. Slender, barely there breasts, dark hair was already a thing for me. I was very young and I believed afterwards that the woman who would be my true love would look and be like this person. And of course later loves had large breasts and it was a disappointment because I’m an idiot.

She wasn’t the first woman I’d been with who had been comfortable having sex in front of other people, sometimes strangers, sometimes people we sort of knew or knew well. Her girlfriend used to watch us having sex. There was a guy who’d come over and sit in a chair at the foot of the bed and pretend he wasn’t watching us have sex. He helped us out one night. I wanted to drink wine off her breasts and was having trouble managing the bottle and drinking. I kept hitting myself in the head with the bottle because I’m a klutz. So he stood on the bed over us and poured and it wasn’t quite like I’d imagined but still pretty great. A nice full-bodied red wine that went everywhere.

This was all when we were in college and for the life of me I can’t remember what her major was. At the college we were going to we didn’t have to declare our majors until the end of sophomore year so maybe she was coasting along like I was, but I doubt it. I wonder that we didn’t spend more time talking, but at the same time that was a pattern I’d already developed as an anti-demisexual demisexual. The reset after this relationship broke me of that pattern.

I knew the relationship wasn’t going to last, even though I hoped it was going to last forever. Even now I can’t see signs that it wouldn’t last in spite of for others, except the prison boyfriend, it hadn’t. We were comfortable with each other, still exploring. Now I can say it was just sex but I can’t see anyone spending that much time together and have it be just sex.

There were intimations, though. The boyfriend was now out of prison and she was maybe just a bit preoccupied. The last nights together with their special focus. The term ended, we went on break, she went back home for a visit, and a week or so later I got a letter where she wrote that she loved me. We had an agreement not to say that word, love, unless we really meant it and so far it had been unsaid.

She returned and I didn’t exist. Not a word from her; I wasn’t even in the room. Her girlfriend said that the boyfriend had beat the crap out of her. She was bruised all over except where it would show. Have patience.

For a long time I was sure I would die before I reached 20. I hadn’t realized how many sorts of death there were. A month after she was back I finally went to her and got the very indefinite word that it was over. I stayed away and had only a couple of more interactions. The next was on my birthday when she was there smiling at me as if nothing had happened. The day after my birthday I was hit by a car. I had made it to 20 physically unscathed and now I had my arm in sling and hurt a lot all the time. We met again in the cafeteria and she wondered to our friends why I was always in the way. The last time was in a car, on break, both of us in the back seat sitting as far apart as possible. We were dropping her off at her home, staying the night, and heading on, eventually to New York City. Her parents were really nice, I got to meet the boyfriend and he wasn’t an ogre. And that was that. One more term at our college and she transferred to a university in her state.

Strangely, for decades I misremembered her last name. I never was able to find her in the college annual or alumni directory. After my mom died, while going through my mom’s things, I came across an old address book which had her name and number. She and her girlfriend and their friends spent a lot of time with my mom, going to her house to cook fancy dinners and do stuff like that. I barely remember being at one dinner, but maybe that was before things were over between us. Anyway, with the right last name I was able to track her down online. Her parents were dead; their kindness was the high point of that trip years previous. She’s married to an economist and I hope she and he are happy.

I was going to end this with a bit about when I first spent any time with the woman who became my third love but as I wrote earlier it’s just too complicated to describe in any meaningful fashion. Instead, after we were back at school from break my first love returned to town with her baby daughter intending to attend the fall term. They were staying with my mom until she could find an apartment, but first she stopped by my dorm room to visit. I have a photo her father took then. She’s standing by the station wagon, baby bottle in hand. Most people think her hair is black but it is a dark auburn. In the photo the sun hits a spray of her long hair that has risen up above her shoulder in the breeze and that hair is ablaze like fire. The end of that summer just before I left the country for a semester abroad program I visited her in her apartment and the woman who I should have loved but didn’t took a photo of us and we are sitting there looking at each other with huge smiles on our faces. When I returned that winter the woman who was my first love had left college and the state with a graduate student who was to become her husband. I wouldn’t see her again for six years.

I begin mowing in May and generally end after the last leaves have fallen in autumn. I use a mower which I’m slowly beating to death, a push gas powered doohickey. Since the terrain isn’t estate lawn flat, the wheels are usually the first to go. Right now the rear wheels are running slouch-wise, the left rear wheel rubbing against the metal base.

Most people have a simple grass yard they mow. A half hour to an hour and they are done. In rural areas mowing can be a time-consuming chore. I remember sitting at one party and hearing men talk about how many hours they mow each week. It’s not that bad here since our “yard” is mostly shaded. I have yard in quotes because there are actually several yards, or areas. Plus I’ve been mowing the yard of a house we have down in the hollow until the people we are renting it to move in. That yard is in full sun so mowing is done each week, just an hour or so.

My partner once counted the trees in our yard and came up with over 200 including saplings. It’s a big yard with our home and five outbuildings (two are small, three are large). There is also the old garden which we are slowly letting return to nature; there are two outbuildings on the north edge. The garden itself has another outbuilding. And there are also two roads I mow, maybe a quarter mile each with the same push mower. It’s a hike and since we’re in West Virginia it is not flat.

The yard, old garden, and roads are in shade and they have to be mowed about once a month until late summer and infrequently after that until I have leaves to deal with from all the trees. The new garden, a clearing in the forest that surrounds us, gets mowed more frequently since it’s in sun, about every two weeks until autumn.

The yard is mostly moss and mowing is just to keep the weeds down. There are a lot of wildflowers I dodge with the mower, bluets and may apples in early spring, wild orchids and ferns which pop up everywhere, Solomon seal and false Solomon seal, and all the hostas and daffodils we’ve planted over the years and are spreading on their own. Our yard is surrounded on four sides by a firebreak, the road being part of the firebreak. We often have bits of forest between the yard and firebreak so the yard includes the firebreak too.

Before mowing I have to go around the yard (and the roads) picking up sticks and tree limbs from all the trees. In autumn once leaves start to fall I rake and haul leaves to our compost piles. Some piles require unchopped leaves so I gather those before I use the mower to chop dried leaves to lessen the accumulation. I probably spend more time dealing with leaves in the yard than I spend all summer mowing. If we left the leaves the moss would disappear and we’d have to worry about the forest fire hazard in autumn and spring. Bad forest fires burned a small corner of our property in the eighties. We lived in another state and drove down to work on the fire lines then. We’d started building, had the shells of two outbuildings completed. That fire was hot, just the largest trees were left standing, topsoil was gone and just clay was left. The next spring that area was filled with young sassafras saplings, the forest regenerating itself. That’s a bit of history for us, a memory. Like the memory of a person on the fire line moving a turtle to the safe side of the firebreak. And the memory of walking through dense smoke in a burned area, trees still burning.

It’s forest here but wasn’t always. During the Civil War some men deserted from the Union troops who had a camp down in the hollow; the camp’s location can be seen noted on old maps as Yankee Camp. The men fell in love with women here and moved to the ridge where they cleared the forest for their homes and fields. The new garden is in one of those once cleared areas, a pine forest now changing to hardwood with large hickories. Before that War there were other inhabitants. We’ve found delicate bird points and other flint artifacts in our yard and nearby. A neighbor while showing us a spring down in the hollow to the west of our home told us as a kid old timers described hunting Indians like deer. That is something that should be remembered.

Another neighbor years ago talked about living in the hollow to the east of us and as a young girl would hear on Sundays people walking the ridges to church singing hymns.

The world is layered, history and memory, wilderness and not wilderness, and the things we barely see.

A while back I had a post with a little about what I call our Museum. Here’s a bit more, but just one photo.

I became enthralled by woodworking around 1980. I found a book at a local university library about early French Canadian furniture and that gave a push. We lived in a house which was barely furnished. I like to do things with my hands.

Woodworking at first was a huge challenge. I had almost no tools of any sort. I didn’t have a place in the house to do woodworking. I had a tight budget.

My first tools were the sort of things one would find at a hardware store. Mail order catalogs soon provided a much broader range of tools to choose from. I gleefully chose; I have an unused pit saw stored away—sometimes desire overwhelms reality.

The best source of tools ended up being antique stores and flea markets. The old stuff was better quality and was economically priced. That led me into the tool collecting world where collector gatherings, tool catalogs, and auctions were even better sources.

Early on while learning the craft I decided to focus on woodworking done solely with hand tools. I cheated a bit with an electric drill used for odd occasions (I much prefer a brace and bit). All the sawing, planning, shaping was done with hand tools and I loved it.

The collection broadened to include not just tools I was using but also reference tools and tools a woodworker in the late eighteenth century owned. I fell in love with the plane and all its varieties and that’s what the photo shows. The top plane is circa 1800 English, the plane lying on its side is circa 1800 American made by Nicholas Taber of Massachusetts. That’s the same plane shown in the Museum post. These bits of history are my way of better understanding the common person and their world. The other two planes are early nineteenth century American. One is a special type of sash plane with two blades for sash window bars.

Over the years I made furniture for our home and used some of the same tools and techniques to build our current home. I do less woodworking now, but oh how I still do love it.

It’s March and I have been cutting and stacking firewood for the next heating season.

All the trees I’ve cut this year are windfalls from the past two years. This is wood from a large red oak snag that had been dead for years next to a road on our property. Last spring it blew down over the road and I finished cutting and stacking it this year. Since the tree had been dead for so long the wood has dried out quickly and shows a number of cracks on the ends of the split pieces.